Tuesday, March 6, 2012

erik naggum rip long live lisp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum Erik Naggum hated Perl with a passion, and considered Perl to be a problem, not a problem solver.[10] He disliked C++, though not as much as he hated Perl, but he generally thought that C++ was too difficult to understand to such a degree that only about 5 people on the planet truly understood it and hence was of little value for humanity. Perl rant by Erik Naggum

* ; ; ; h e l m e r . . .
| I have been slowly learning lisp over the past year and have had someone
| mention to me that I should learn perl, for jobs etc.

the unemployed programmer had a problem. "I know", said the programmer,
"I'll just learn perl." the unemployed programmer now had two problems.
having a job is not unimportant, but if knowing perl is a requirement for
a particular job, consider another one before taking that one. this is
true even if you know perl very well. life is too long to be an expert
at harmful things, including such evilness as C++ and perl.

I once studied perl enough to read perl code and spot bugs in other
people's programs (but later gained the wisdom that this was not an
accomplishment -- spotting a bug in a perl program is like spotting the
dog that brought the fleas), but I don't write in it and I don't ever
plan to use it for anything (part of my new position is quality assurance
for the systems I'm inheriting responsibility for, and part of any
serious QA is removing perl code the same way you go over a dilapidated
building you inherit to remove chewing gum and duct tape and fix whatever
was kept together for real). also, very much unlike any other language I
have ever studied, perl has failed to stick to memory, a phenomenon that
has actually puzzled me, but I guess there are some things that are so
gross you just have to forget, or it'll destroy something with you. perl
is the first such thing I have known.
this is your brain. this is perl. this is your brain on perl. any
questions?

| If I learn lisp well will I be able to do what people do with perl[?]

no, you won't. however, there is a very important clue to be had from
this: what people do with perl is wrong. perl makes a whole lot of tasks
easy to do, but if you look closely, you will see that those tasks are
fundamentally braindamaged, and should never have been initiated. perl
is perhaps the best example I can think of for a theory I have on the
ills of optimization and the design choices people make. most people,
when faced with a problem, will not investigate the cause of the problem,
but will instead want to solve it because the problem is actually in the
way of something more important than figuring out why something suddenly
got in their way out of nowhere. if you are a programmer, you may reach
for perl at this point, and perl can remove your problem. happy, you go
on, but find another problem blocking your way, requiring more perl --
the perl programmer who veers off the road into the forest will get out
of his car and cut down each and every tree that blocks his progress,
then drive a few meters and repeat the whole process. whether he gets
where he wanted to go or not is immaterial -- a perl programmer will
happily keep moving forward and look busy. getting a perl programmer
back on the road is a managerial responsibility, and it can be very hard:
the perl programmer is very good at solving his own problems and assure
you that he's on the right track -- he looks like any other programmer
who is stuck, and this happens to all of us, but the perl programmer is
very different in one crucial capacity: the tool is causing the problems,
and unlike other programmers who discover the cause of the problem sooner
or later and try something else, perl is rewarding the programmer with a
very strong sense of control and accomplishment that a perl programmer
does _not_ try something else.

it's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards
idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done,
and on top of it, it punishes conscientiousness and quality craftsmanship
-- put simply: you can commit any dirty hack in a few minutes in perl,
but you can't write an elegant, maintainabale program that becomes an
asset to both you and your employer; you can make something work, but you
can't really figure out its complete set of failure modes and conditions
of failure. (how do you tell when a regexp has a false positive match?)
a person's behavior is shaped by the rewards and the punishment he has
received while not thinking about his own actions. few people habitually
engage in the introspection necessary to break out of this "social
programming" or decide to ignore the signals that other people send them,
so this is a powerful mechanism for programming the unthinking masses.
rewarding idiotic behavior and punishing smart behavior effectively
brainwashes people, destroying their value systems and their trust in
their own understanding and appreciation of the world they live in, but
if you're very good at it, you can create a new world for them in which
all of this makes sense.

to really destroy any useful concepts of how software is supposed to work
together, for instance, the best possible way is to ridicule the simple
and straightforward concepts inherent in Lisp's read and print syntax,
then ridicule the overly complex and entangled concepts in stuff like IDL
and CORBA, which does basically the same thing as Lisp's simple syntax,
and then hail the randomness of various programs that output junk data,
because you can easily massage the data into the randomness that some
other program accepts as input. instead of having syntax-driven data
sharing between programs, you have code-driven glue between programs, and
because you are brainwashed perl idiot, this is an improvement, mostly to
your job security. and once you start down this path, every move forward
is a lot cheaper than any actual improvements to the system that would
_obviate_ the need for more glue code. however, if you never start down
this path, you have a chance of making relevant and important changes.

that's why, if you learn Lisp and become a good programmer, you will
never want to do what people do with perl. as such a good programmer,
one in five managers will notice that you solve problems differently and
will want to hire you to clean up after the perl programmers he used to
be mortally afraid of firing, and you can push any language you want at
this point -- just make sure you can find more programmers he can hire
who know it and always keep your code well-documented and readable -- you
do _not_ want to make any other programming language appear as random as
perl to any manager. perl is already a "necessary evil", but still evil,
while other languages don't have the "necessary" label, so if you screw
up, it will hurt other programmers, too. this problem can always be
minimized by simply being good at what you do. few perl programmers are
actually good at anything but getting perl to solve their _immediate_
problems, so you have an incredible advantage if you're a good Lisper.

I'll concede, however, that it is very important to be able to understand
what perl programmers do. if you don't understand what they are talking
about, you won't understand what they are actually trying to accomplish
with all the incredibly braindamaged uses of hash tables and syntactic
sadomasochism, and you won't be able to see through their charades and
"just one more hack, and I'll be there" lies.

here's a simple rule to use on perl programmers. if a solution is clean
and complete, it will immediately look like a tremendous amount of work
to a perl programmer, which it will: writing code that does the right
thing in perl is incredibly arduous. this is the only positive use for
perl programmers. like a really bad horror movie, where the evil guys
have no redeeming qualities whatsoever and will hate anything beautiful
or good, a true perl programmer will have a strong emotional reaction to
any really good solution: there's no way he can improve on it with his
perl hackery, and the very existence of his expertise is threatened.

then there are good programmers who know and use perl for some tasks, but
more than anything else know when _not_ to use it. they are _very_ rare.